Correspondence: cummings & Goines, and other funs

Self-portrait by ee cummings
Public Domain

Edited by Moristotle

[Items of correspondence are not attributed; they remain anonymous. They have been chosen for their inherent interest as journalism, story, or provocative opinion, which may or may not be shared by the editor or other members of the staff of Moristotle & Co.]

There is such joy to be found in helping others, you’d think there’d be more of it.

The Northern Lights, Alaska

Moristotle, didn’t you and your wife spend the month of June last year in Montmartre? The story “Newly Discovered van Gogh Drawing Is a ‘Stylistic Missing Link’” from The New York Times [Nina Siegal, January 16] is fascinating. It says that “The Van Gogh Museum [in Amsterdam] on Tuesday announced the discovery of a previously unknown drawing by Vincent van Gogh, which the museum said was completed about a month after the Dutch post-Impressionist artist arrived in Paris in 1886. The museum’s researchers studied the style and history of ‘The Hill of Montmartre with Stone Quarry,’ dated March 1886, and found documents they said confirm that it is a lost van Gogh.” [Read article.]
    [Yes, we were there in April 2016 and June last year. My “Paris Journal” testifies to it.]

Want to try “going gray”? The New York Times story, “Is the Answer to Phone Addiction a Worse Phone?” [Nellie Bowles, January 12], explains what “going gray” refers to [and, after this excerpt, there’s a link to another article that explains how to “go gray”]:

SAN FRANCISCO — I’ve gone gray, and it’s great.
    In an effort to break my smartphone addiction, I’ve joined a small group of people turning their phone screens to grayscale – cutting out the colors and going with a range of shades from white to black. First popularized by the tech ethicist Tristan Harris, the goal of sticking to shades of gray is to make the glittering screen a little less stimulating.
    I’ve been gray for a couple days, and it’s remarkable how well it has eased my twitchy phone checking, suggesting that one way to break phone attachment may be to, essentially, make my phone a little worse. We’re simple animals, excited by bright colors, it turns out. [read more]

[“[How to] Change Your Screen to Gray to Combat Phone Addiction”]

My wife’s college roommate sent us some great puns, and I’ve selected ones that resonate with characters & themes of Moristotle & Co.:
    A grenade thrown into a kitchen in France would result in Linoleum Blownapart.
    A hole has been found in the nudist-camp wall. The police are looking into it.
    Atheism is a non-prophet organization.
    The midget fortune-teller who escaped from prison [in Western Australia] was a small medium at large.
    A backward poet writes inverse.
    In a democracy it’s your vote that counts. In feudalism it’s your count that votes.
    If you jumped off the bridge in Paris, you’d be in Seine.
    There was the person who sent ten puns to friends, with the hope that at least one of the puns would make them laugh. No pun in ten did.

As long as you’re writing you can’t die – everybody knows that.

By David Lance Goines

Grateful for correspondence, Moristotle